Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Books that reappear when you destroy them, lampshades made of skin, people named with numbers and who can’t recall each other, a Universal Ceiling constructed by an otherwise faceless authority, a stairwell stuffed with birds: the terrain and populace of SKY SAW is packed with stroboscopic memory mirage. In dynamic sentences and image, Blake Butler crafts a post-Lynchian nightmare where space and family have deformed, leaving the human persons left in the strange wake to struggle after the shapes of both what they loved and who they were.

The klieg-light intensity of Butler's writing intimates that there is something fundamentally terrifying about what each of us does every single night, which is to pitch our minds and bodies into oblivion. — TIME

In an interview published in the winter 2010 issue of the PARIS REVIEW, Jonathan Franzen said to Stephen Burn, "I've never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing FREEDOM. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, 'This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.'’ Franzen added that this struck him as "a good sign"—an indication that he was "pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories."

Blake Butler is the opposite of that. — BOOKFORUM

I couldn't tell what was really happening and what wasn't or who it was or wasn't happening too. I really wanted to know if they were dreaming awake talking about themselves or an entity. If you can read this book and understand it than truly you are amazing and can read anything. I must be a daft idiot cause this book made me want to kill it and myself for even trying so hard. — Shree Lafaye Ziller AMAZON.com

Butler is the 21st century answer to William Burroughs. – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY